Biography

He was a good friend to Carl Reiner.

Son of Albert L. Kanter, who founded the successful "Classic Comics" (later "Classics Illustrated") series in 1941. Through Hal's Hollywood connections, "Classics Illustrated" obtained comic-book rights to The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Buccaneer (1958).

Profiled in "The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV's Golden Age" by Jordan Young (BearManor Media).

Kanter served as an Army Sergeant in World War II, in the Pacific. He set up Armed Forces Radio Stations on islands such as Guam and Enawatak. He was also an air combat correspondent for "Yank" magazine. This included flying over the air raid on Yokohama.

[on James Stewart] One day somebody comes running into my office and says you better get down and see Jimmy, he is absolutely furious. I go down to his dressing room, and he's really hot. The problem was he had just found out that we were casting Hal Williams and he related that to a script for a show in which there was a cop lashing into the professor character. 'Blacks are bossing white people all over the country,' he says to me angrily, 'and now we're going to have the same damn thing on prime time television? A black is going to be lecturing me with millions of people watching? No way. I get casting approval and Williams is out.' I couldn't believe it. Aside from everything else, he'd screwed up the shows, because Williams had been hired to play an FBI agent on another episode. But his anger about the thing was frightening. He acted chagrined when I told him about the mix up he'd made, but both of us knew that he'd let one cat out of the bag that he would have preferred not to. He didn't have an easy relationship with blacks even as fictional characters.